VI. Emile Durkheim.

In college, Durkheim irritated me with his seeming insistence that social forms and organization preceded material conditions, particularly at the start of civilization—it just didn’t happen that way. Also, despite his use of numerical data, there’s still a little mythic hocus pocus about his rhetoric. But Durkheim’s ideas have stayed with me because he was interested in the hidden glues of society–for example, forms of experience that are religious without god, or why year after year, roughly the same percentage of people in a country or other large group kill themselves. When I first read his Suicide, it was the season of spring midterms at Harvard, and the blood read of its cover in the hands of Social Studies majors throughout campus had a morbid resonance.

For Durkheim, the modern world is marked by the rise of social anomie and the decline of the forces of cohesive meaning. Against this, he pitted those rituals and gatherings which dissolve our small, isolating, tribal divisions into a larger whole. Durkheim regarded events like the Super Bowl, which brings millions of Americans together in the common experience of game watching while wearing their totemic jerseys, as indistinguishable in essence from what he considered the “elementary” religious rituals of the Australian aborigines. These forms of quasi-religious binding have a dark side: e.g., the classic fascists had their own rituals—events full of pseudopagan elements like the Nuremberg rally

Durkheim had a great influence on the French school system, and he believed in a secular, unifying education. This wasn’t so different from the revolutionary ideology that drove the post-independence growth of American public schooling. Yes, Durkheim’s model was a bit culturally imperialistic, but it was animated by the faith that all persons in France could be good Frenchmen, whatever their religious and other differences.

Durkheim wouldn’t be surprised to see the level of social anomie in America rise after another century of further division of labor and breakdown of traditional social bonds, but up until now he would have been impressed by our ability to continue united across a continent despite this trend through our republican rituals, education, and other ties. Perhaps recent technological change has amplified the acceleration of anomie, and given such conditions, Durkheim might have anticipated that 2016 would be a year of big rallies in our politics, and that the regime would gather masses of cult-like devotees looking for meaning and purpose amidst their expanding sense of dissolution of common values. Durkheim might have judged the regime’s rituals for their potential for national unification versus division. While Durkheim wished to bring all of France together within one secular system, the “nation” that our new regime wishes to make “great” leaves out vast swaths of our country’s populace.

Durkheim also would have opposed our regime’s undermining, through privatization or other division, of institutions that he considered important for society’s sense of unity—for example, our prisons (which dispense society’s sense of justice), and of public education. Without public education’s indoctrination in the common republican values of our society, our national unity could be further strained.

But this discussion of Durkheim the logical social theorist ignores the moral passion that he showed during Dreyfus affair. He wrote a scathing response to the anti-Dreyfus disparagement of the liberal intellectuals and artists who dared to challenge the Rightists in the French government. I expect that, if he were around today in the United States, he would join the anti-regime resistance, and he’d be writing far better essays than this one.